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Facebook is under investigation in the EU for its massive leak of 533 million people's data — and it could face a fine in the billions (FB)

facebook mark zuckerbergAndrew Harnik/AP

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Europe's leading privacy regulator is investigating whether Facebook broke the law in its handling of a leak of over 533 million people's phone numbers and personal data.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission, the body charged with overseeing Facebook's privacy compliance in the European Union, announced it had opened an investigation into the social media giant on Wednesday. If Facebook is found to have violated the EU's data rules, it could face a monetary fine of up to 4% of its $86 billion global revenue.

In a statement, the DPC said it believes EU data rules "may have been, and/or are being, infringed in relation to Facebook Users' personal data."

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The personal data of over 533 million Facebook users were dumped online for free in a hacking forum earlier this month, Insider first reported. The data included phone numbers that users didn't make public on their Facebook profiles, which were scraped by cybercriminals in violation of Facebook's terms of service. 

When news of the leak first broke, Facebook said the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company patched in 2019, and downplayed the issue as "previously reported" — but the company never publicly addressed the vulnerability in detail until the data dump this month.

Facebook also said it does not plan to notify the hundreds of millions affected by the data breach because it's not confident that it has full knowledge of which users are affected, and because users can't take steps to fix the issue given that the data has already been published online.

The DPC investigation comes on the heels of pressure from the European Commission. Justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Monday that he had met with the DPC head Helen Dixon regarding the Facebook leak.

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//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1381663631981617163?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Today I spoke with Helen Dixon @DPCIreland about the #FacebookLeak. The Commission continues to follow this case closely and is committed to supporting national authorities. We also call on @Facebook to cooperate actively and swiftly to shed light on the identified issues.

The EU investigation will probe whether Facebook had a legal obligation to notify users and European regulators when it found and fixed the vulnerability. The EU's data privacy rules, known as GDPR, require such disclosures — but the GDPR only applies to data processed after 2018, and it's not yet clear if the leaked Facebook data was scraped before the GDPR went into effect.

The DPC said that it has already started questioning Facebook about the data leak and that Facebook has "furnished a number of responses."

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